Scottrade was ok but didn't work well for some penny or sub-penny stocks because limit orders couldn't be put in in term smaller than $0.01 so if you were in a sub-penny you wanted to sell at $0.0018, for example, you couldn't do it easily.
I finally settled on Freetrade.Com and so far, don't think they can be beat. It's a division of Ameritrade and it is basically no frills as far as customer service but still has some nice features available such as Level Two, One minute "live" charting, etc. It has the features of most other Ameritrade, Ameritrade Plus or similar accounts.
The commissions are great!! Trades 1-20 per month are free, trades 21-100 $3 each, $2 for trades 101-200, and $1 only for trades 201 and up.
The only downsides I have seen so far is you can only fund your account by wire which usually cost something at your bank and the account minimum is $5k to open. The only other funding option is to transfer funds or stocks from another Ameritrade account so what I do is I do a no fee electronic transfer into my Ameritrade Plus account and then transfer into my Freetrade account. It takes an extra day sometimes but saves me the extra $25 wire fee at my bank to get money into the Freetrade account.
Freetrade can afford to be free or low cost because they don't have a large customer service staff. You can only reach customer service via email and have to wait for a response, although, in my experience, they have generally gotten back to me in about an hour during normal hours.
They only take experienced clients so they don't have to have a large staff answering the same questions over and over.
All in all, I am very happy with Freetrade. They also don't spend any money on advertising either so if people don't learn about it word of mouth like this, it may not eventually exist if they don't continue to grow. But for now, it's the best deal I've seen and as it's part of Ameritrade, if Freetrade does cease to exist one day, it's not like they will leave you and your account hanging. I'm sure if they ever closed down, they would transfer your account seamlessly into something else without missing a beat so you wouldn't be in limbo trading-wise.
BTW, mtnres, was mountain resident. I lived in Colorado when I first got on the internet and it kind of stuck. |
